Boxing is also filled with nostalgia, as Liebling noticed, and sometimes it’s nostalgia for its own sake: He saw, even in his day, that everyone contended that boxing used to be better. The old fighters thought it was better back in the days when they were still fighting; and the writers thought it was better back in the old days when they first fell in love with the sport. Liebling calls the boxing writers (who last longer) “the most persistent howlers after antiquity.”
Virgil, Andre, and Antonio returned, triumphant and easy, and Virgil gave the boys some time off. I met him often in the early mornings at Coffee with a Beat and got to know Nate, the owner, a little bit and even bought some T-shirts from him; he was a childhood friend of Virgil’s. Virgil pretty much frequented only black-owned businesses. His mother had been politically active in the civil rights movement, and being in Oakland, near Berkeley, Virg retained some of that militant outlook, heavily seasoned with a street education.
We would sit and talk for hours, meeting people, carrying on conversations through multiple interruptions and digressions. Virgil had derived some of his philosophy from Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings—a samurai treatise on fighting strategy—and when he saw that the Olympic symbol was five linked rings, he knew Andre was going to win gold: “His style, his philosophy is too much for anyone to get a handle on in four two-minute rounds.” Virgil had intentionally kept Andre out of international competition, because that way it was harder for the much more experienced, older European fighters with eight years of amateur experience to get tape on Andre, to come up with a plan for him. They couldn’t figure him out in the short sprints that make up amateur boxing. Virgil mentioned Bruce Lee and jeet kune do. “Bruce Lee nearly got his ass whupped by a man off the street, a big, strong, tough man, and only because of his conditioning was he able to win. So he changed his system. He realized he was too locked in place by tradition. In a fight, I’m free. If I’m locked in a system…Here’s Andre in the Olympics, and the first fight he wins, the thing the other fighters are thinking about is his speed. Once I got speed on your mind, I got you thinking and halfway beat. So you’re wondering if you can hit me, and then I keep you from hitting me for the first round, and now you’re convinced you can’t hit me.
“Like Tyson,” he continued. “People would train to get away from the punch, and convince themselves that they couldn’t handle the punch. They would do his work for him, and then Buster Douglas and Evander showed that you just had to have confidence in the fact you could handle his punch, and if you frustrate a puncher you got him beat—because he’s used to people disappearing when he hits them. He’s got no science to fall back on.”
Boxing is full of great fights in which big punchers have been exposed. The most famous, classic example is the “Rumble in the Jungle,” Ali-Foreman in Zaire. Foreman was thought to be an unbeatable force of nature, the greatest puncher of all time. Ali took a horrendous pounding, absorbed it lying on the ropes, and as Foreman tired, Ali came dancing back in the eighth round and knocked him out. He beat Foreman’s mind as much as his body. Liebling had written, “Any fight in which one man can punch and the other must disarm him is exciting, like watching an attempt by a bomb squad to remove a fuse.”
The Leonard-Duran fights are probably my favorite. In their first meeting, Leonard, the boxer, was a young, fresh kid out of the Olympics, and Duran (a shoeshine boy from Panama) was the most feared boxer-puncher in his weight class, maybe in history. Duran was called Manos de Piedra, “Hands of Stone.” Leonard stood in and brawled with Duran, instead of boxing, and although Duran won, he was frustrated because Leonard had taken his best shot and kept fighting. The second time they met, Leonard stood in the middle of the ring when the bell rang, Duran’s usual spot; and Leonard moved and danced and showboated and so confused and twisted Duran’s mind that he quit, with the now infamous “No más,” to the howling outrage of the boxing community. Leonard took Duran’s legend and wove it into his own. Making somebody quit—that’s domination.
Virgil turned to me and said, “It’s like this: When I was a kid in Oakland, we used to collect those big wolf spiders. We used to fight those spiders, the kids would, because they would tear each other up. Especially females. Now, I knew that in my basement there was a black widow spider. I had seen her many times, and I would go and check on it and find it in the same place. So I got the spider and cleaned up the whole neighborhood.” That’s Virgil’s attitude: Think outside the problem, win with something overwhelming, leave nothing to chance.
I was curious as to how Andre’s opponents were chosen. At this stage in a fighter’s career, I knew from reading, it was important to bring him up slowly. Andre had what Teddy Atlas loved to call the “amateur pedigree,” meaning he had more than 150 amateur fights, starting when he was ten years old, and he had the greatest amateur achievement—he won gold in the Olympics. Antonio had about 250 amateur fights, and some fighters will have more than that before they turn pro. It means that every week since they were ten or twelve years old they were jumping into the car, driving to a tournament, and fighting. Records aren’t kept, as your win-loss ratio isn’t so critical, but Andre hadn’t lost an amateur fight since 1997 (and he claims that that was a judging error and wants to avenge the loss). Professional fighting is something totally different. It’s scored differently, the rounds are longer and there’s more of them, and of course there is no headgear. You’re not looking to score points as much as to hurt the guy. To start a pro career, you might fight four or five four-rounders and then five or six six-rounders, then eights, and so on, depending on how you do. But the goal is title fights, and those are twelve rounds. As I heard T, one of Andre’s managers, say, “They don’t give away belts for nothing less than twelve-rounders.” And title shots are the only goal as far as money is concerned.
There is a principle that Angelo Dundee (the legendary trainer of Ali and Leonard) referred to as “slow-teach,” which is slowly exposing your fighter to bigger challenges. Just enough to stretch him, not so that he is seriously challenged or even lose, but more to just expose him to something he might not have seen, to force him to adapt and grow as a fighter. For Andre, the guys he had fought so far knew they couldn’t come close to matching him in speed or skill, so they were forced to try to intimidate him, to rough him up and shake his confidence. It infuriated him. “They look at my baby face and say, ‘Oh, you have to rough up Olympic champs,’ and I’m like, ‘What makes you think you can rough me up? Now that I won, I’m pampered?’ I went and took that medal from a bunch of tough guys.”
In Andre’s last fight, against a white kid from Louisiana, the kid had been hopelessly outclassed and had responded by fouling repeatedly, until he was disqualified. Andre smiled, his eyes soft, warm, pitiless brown pools. “He was looking for a way out. He knew he was going to be knocked out and didn’t want to go like that, so he just kept hitting after the break.”
I had seen Andre’s fights so far, complete blowouts of much less talented individuals, nonthreats, called “opponents,” boxing lingo for someone brought in to lose to your prospect. There are, of course, varying degrees of opponent; your fighter might be 4–0 and the opponent might be 2–6, and there are infamous opponents whose records might run 4–16, guys who are used to losing and are just out looking for a payday, record padding for young hungry contenders with money and intelligence backing them. A contender in today’s world isn’t taken seriously unless he is 20–0; remaining undefeated is incredibly important, and two or three losses can be the end of a career. MMA is different. There are so many ways to lose that guys at the top level can have six or eight losses. It depends more on who they fought.
In the gym, Virgil would have me shadowbox in front of the mirror, moving in super slow motion for five or six rounds, the slower the better. “Slow works the tendons, the sinews, and it hurts more; but it makes you stronger, gives you power. Speed will come when the mechanics are right.” I thought about tai chi. My arms and shoulders would be screaming, and when I finally went to the heavy bag next to Antonio, it was a huge relief to be able to hit fast. Antonio was like a snake, in and out, his punches snapping the bag.
I had no idea that boxers did so much shadowboxing. Most days, Andre will do ten or twelve rounds of shadowboxing, working on his movement, sliding around the ring. Day in, day out, and you start to appreciate the extreme concentration needed to stay focused, the tremendous imagination required to envision an op